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Song and Dance

Last month saw the release of Richard Driscoll’s truly awful
‘3D horror comedy western musical’ Eldorado (aka Eldorado in 3D) which gives us
an embarrassment of riches in picking a topic for the March column. I could
talk about 3D films, but like everyone else I’m thoroughly bored with them and
there’s really nothing to say except "Make it stop!” In any case, the released
version of Eldorado isn’t in 3D (although, in true Richard Driscoll fashion, it
still says ‘in 3D’ in big letters in the opening titles) so the topic is moot
for now.

Of course I’ve got to look at Driscoll’s overall awful
oeuvre at some point, but not today, not right now. Interestingly, after years
of solo graft on my part, other people are starting to write about his films (and,
as above, the recurring phrase is "Make it stop!”). Even Video Watchdog is
getting in on the game with Ramsey Campbell reviewing Evil Calls in his ‘Ramsey’s
Rambles’ column. But my Driscoll column is for another day - when I’ve
recovered my strength from sitting through Eldorado in 3D (not in 3D).

Horror comedies? Yes, there’s a topic to deal with one day. FromAbbott and Costello meet Frankenstein to Shaun of the Dead and beyond. But that’s
a big field and needs a lot of sitting down and thinking about. Suffice to say
for now that this month sees the DVD release of the very funny horror comedyKill Keith with a quote from me on the front of the sleeve. Always a thrill to
see my name on the shelves of HMV.

What about westerns? Actually there’s been a mini-run of
horror westerns recently, courtesy of DVD label Left Films which released two
terrific American ten-gallon terrors: Cowboys vs Zombies (a retitling of The
Dead and the Damned) and Devil’s Crossing. Very different but both very
enjoyable. Left Films also released Umbrage: The First Vampire, which has
western flashbacks and a cowboy vampire but also has some nonsense about Lilith
and the Garden of Eden plus a narrative full of plot-holes you could get your
arm through. Which really leaves me no choice but to consider musicals, and how
they relate to the horror/fantasy/sci-fi genre.

Now, you can’t write about musical horror without writing
about Rocky Horror. It’s rather alarming to consider that when I first saw that
film, in my school days - and indeed my first experience of watching the show
on stage - it was less than ten years old. It was a real cult thing back then;
a lot of people had no real idea what it was or had never heard of it at all. I
had the soundtrack album on picture disc LP, a photo of Tim Curry as Frank N
Furter strategically positioned on each side of the record so that the spindle
always appeared very rude indeed. In fact, my party piece at the time was
miming in full get-up to ‘Sweet Transvestite’, something that few of my
contemporaries dared to do. Nowadays that sort of thing is old hat.

A perfect demonstration of how mainstream Rocky Horror has
become was a few weeks back on the 60th anniversary of the Queen’s accession to
the throne. On that particular day, the news cameras showed us HM the Q
visiting a primary school, unveiling a plaque, accepting some flowers and then
having to sit through a performance by the little kids. And what song/dance
routine did these seven-year-olds perform in front of the octogenarian Monarch?
That’s right - ‘The Timewarp’. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person agog at the
screen, wondering not only what had happened to the cultest of cults, but also
how on Earth the Queen would react when three dozen Year 2 kids all did the
pelvic thrust at her.

It turned out this was a bowdlerised version of the routine
where the pelvic thrust had been replaced with a jump in the air. Lucky escape
for Her Maj there. But in amongst all the malarkey that inevitably now
surrounds it, it’s easy to lose sight of what Rocky Horror actually is, which
is a riff on the Frankenstein story. Frank N Furter is Dr Frankenstein (hence
the name) and, like creators before him, he is building a man. Just for more,
ah, physical reasons than normal. The first half of the film/play, which has
most of the best songs in it, lampoons old B-movies and then towards the end it
all goes bonkers as it turns out Furter and his servants are aliens and the
spooky old house is a spaceship.

There is a little-seen semi-sequel to Rocky Horror, calledShock Treatment, with a cast that includes Barry Humphries, Rik Mayall and
Jessica Harper from Suspiria as well as some of the RHPS cast playing different
characters. It’s a sort of plastic-reality, near-future satire without the
overt horror/sci-fi stuff but it does have several extremely catchy songs. Actually:
let’s consider Rik Mayall. There’s a man who has made some truly bizarre and
often very, very, very bad films indeed. He’s in Eldorado (and Evil Calls too).
Weird to think that his best genre role is his non-speaking background
appearance playing chess in An American Werewolf in London. And even weirder to
realise that Drop Dead Fred is not his worst film.

After Rocky Horror, the next best known example of the
musical/horror hybrid is probably Little Shop of Horrors, one of a select group
of movies which started out as non-musical films, then got adapted as stage
musicals, then got filmed in their musical versions. Hairspray and The
Producers are two others. (A former colleague once rented the original John
Waters version of Hairspray and couldn’t understand why there were no songs in
it!) Little Shop of course started life as a Roger Corman cheapie which was
somehow just weird enough - helped by
Jack Nicolson’s extraordinary performance as a sadistic dentist - to rise above
his normal fare and become a cult classic in its own right.

Much later, someone had the bright idea that the story could
be done on stage, with a big, animated plant - and as a musical to boot. And
that then got filmed as a big budget movie, with Steve Martin taking over the
dentist role and Frank Oz directing. (Dentists in horror movies - there’s
another topic for a future column. Actually, there’s a dentist in Eldorado,
played by Jeff Fahey with a bizarre Jamaican accent.) When I interviewed Corman
in he 1990s he was adamant that everybody had forgotten the multi-million
dollar remake of Little Shop but his five-bucks-and-change B-movie was still
making money, I didn’t want to disabuse him of the notion but he was of course
wildly wrong.

The film certainly hasn’t been forgotten, and the stage
musical also continues to pop up, in fact it’s something of an amdram staple. There’s
a brilliant episode of Family Guy in which aged pederast Herbert dreams of a
perfect life with Chris Griffin and sings ‘Somewhere That’s Green’, with Chris
as Seymour and Herbert in the white Marilyn-style dress as Audrey. Also worth
noting is that the original ending, in which Seymour dreams that Audrey II has
grown to Godzilla size, was briefly, accidentally released on an early DVD and
was really hot property for many years (I expect it’s on YouTube now). I used
to have a picture of that ending on a Little Shop of Horrors sticker (one of a
set of 50) which was almost as valuable to me as my Dr Strangelove custard pie
fight photo (see last month’s column). Finally, I can recall some years ago sitting through an amateur
production called Frankenstein: The Panto - no, honestly - in which one of theLittle Shop songs was performed as ‘Suddenly Igor’!

There are a whole bunch of other, more obscure stage
musicals. In the mid-1990s there was a musical version of The Fly, believe it
or not. And I don’t mean the opera version by Howard Shore; this came much
earlier. It was a little show that ran for a week or two in London, with a cast
that included the bloke out of Butterflies. Somewhere I’ve still got an audio
cassette that I was given with a couple of the songs on. Or what about another
story that passed across my desk in the early days of SFX: a time-travel comedy
based on the songs of Cliff Richard, called Harry’s Webb! I swear to you I am
not making this stuff up. Then there was Plan Nine: The Musical starring Luke
Goss after Bros split up but before he became Guillermo del Toro’s go-to
villain. I later got to ask Goss about this and it transpired he’d never seen
the original film. And Return to the Forbidden Planet of course but that always
struck me as trying too hard to be ‘cult’. The same goes for something calledCaptain Jack and the Space Invaders.

Back up on screen, there’s a particularly awful thing calledThe Jekyll and Hyde Rock’n’Roll Musical which I had the misfortune of sitting
through once. Written by and starring a man with no significant musical or
acting ability, this seemed unclear whether it was set in Victorian London or
modern day California. While all the songs have thankfully faded from memory (some
of them started to fade while I was actually watching the film) I can never
forget the hilarious sight of a crew member unsuccessfully trying to hide in
the corner of a room as the main characters walked past. Calling this rubbish ‘inept’
would be charitable.

I suppose a very obvious one that I’ve omitted so far is The
Phantom of the Opera. That’s kind of weird, isn’t it, if you think about it. On
the one hand, Gaston Leroux’s tale is considered a classic horror story and
there have been numerous film versions, from Lon Chaney through Hammer to
Robert Englund and Dario Argento. Yet, at the same time, the very same story is
this romantic, tragic love story that forms the basis for a smash hit West End
musical that mums and aunties love. Yet it’s the same story. How does that
work? I wonder if anyone ever rented the Lon Chaney version assuming it was the
Lloyd Webber thing, only to find that there’s no songs in it?

Then of course Joel Schumacher made a film of the musical
and we just didn’t know what to do, did we? Was it a horror film? All the other
things called Phantom of the Opera are horror films, so it must be a horror
film. But it just doesn’t seem like one. A bit like when Disney did The
Hunchback of Notre Dame. Another horror classic (in the sense that both the
Chaney version and the Laughton version are considered horror movies) but now
it was a Disney cartoon. What was going on? At least when they filmed the
Sondheim version of Sweeney Todd they gave the gig to Tim Burton, a man so
spooky and weird that Helena Bonham Carter can stand next to him and look
relatively normal.

Ooh ooh, there’s another one I should mention. The Nightmare
Before Christmas. Not actually directed by Burton, despite what many people
think, but produced by him and packed with great Danny Elfman songs. And there’s
a whole bunch more stage and screen musicals in the horror/sci-fi/fantasy
genre, when you start to think about them. One that’s often overlooked isRodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, which technically is a ghost story. And now
there’s the latest effort, Eldorado in 2D, in which an extraordinary cast of
doing-it-for-the-paycheque names, including Brigitte Nielsen, Steve Guttenberg
and Sylvester McCoy mime to songs from the Blues Brothers soundtrack, performed
by Cornish club singers, while one of the regular extras from Ashes to Ashesinexplicably chops up and eats people in the background. You have never seen - or
heard - anything like it.

MJ Simpson has been writing since he
found out which end of a pencil makes a mark. After editing sci-fan
club mags he spent three years on the staff of SFX and helped to launch
Total Film before switching to freelance work for Fangoria, Shivers,
Video Watchdog, DeathRay and other cult movie magazines. He
has a number of scripts in development and has been working on his
third book, a biography of 'Bride of Frankenstein' Elsa Lanchester, for a very long time, but he
promises to have it finished soon (-ish). Mike lives in Leicester
with his wife, Mrs S, and his young son, TF Simpson. By day he edits
the university's website and in the evenings he edits MJSimpson.co.uk.
He should probably get out more.